


They'll Be Carving You up Alright

by OwnThyself



Category: Cobra Kai (Web Series), Karate Kid (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Gore, Bonsai Therapy, Bullying, Cannibalism, Christmas Presents, Dreams and Nightmares, Eventual Happy Ending, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:15:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27539749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OwnThyself/pseuds/OwnThyself
Summary: It’s Christmas Eve when Daniel dreams that Dutch kills him. Again.
Relationships: Daniel LaRusso/Johnny Lawrence
Comments: 3
Kudos: 28





	They'll Be Carving You up Alright

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StarkAstarte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/gifts).



It’s Christmas Eve when Daniel dreams that Dutch kills him. Again.

He wakes with an awful start, chest caving in it’s so hard to breathe. _Calm down. Calm down, lungs_. _Easy, old heart_ , he tells himself, staring at the unmoving ceiling in terror. Air in. Air out. You can do this. It’s just the old nightmare, a carbon copy of itself, coming through the ether to say _Hello, Danielle. You miss me, Danielle?_

Daniel swings his bare legs out of bed, reaches for his reading glasses in the dark, fingers scrabbling up the wooden curve of the bonsai pot. The night is cold, and his breathing would mist if he were outdoors, which is where he wants to be, outside, under a full sky of stars, out of Encino and in the desert. It’s colder there, but less… this, less everything all at once, and he can’t figure out why it’s still so tough to breathe now, because he knows he’s awake, knows he isn’t dead. _C’mon, old heart. Don’t go stupid on me_.

_Well, well, well. If it isn’t little Danielle._

He shuts his eyes, even as he slides the glasses on, getting up to cast the windows open into the still, sleeping night. The nightmare comes on like it always does, unpredictable, unbidden. The last time he’d woken up from Dutch he’d bolted upright in another, softer bedroom, sweating and feverstruck, Amanda’s cool fingers on his brow, her voice sleep-honeyed with concern. _What’s wrong, babe? Daniel. Honey. It’s okay, breathe for me._ He remembers the carnelian red of her nightie, the elaborate lace of it casting patterns from lamp shadows on his bare chest, so when they both looked down at his heaving body he seemed to be short-circuiting in embroidery, his skin a strange tapestry of wet fear.

He remembers how the then Amanda LaRusso once made it as right as she could, with the tools at her disposal to take care, to hold safe, to fetch water and press kisses and soothe into the night of three years, maybe four, so long ago. Mandy, a compassionate Nurse Nightingale, not knowing what the hell she was trying to cure but giving it her all anyway. Daniel’s mouth thins into a smile at the memory, the goddamned… purity? Charity? Irony seems too easy, somehow, to say what that was, what it meant. All he knows for sure is that he’d let himself believe it could be the last time: the last nightmare cured by marital bliss. How unfair that had been to Mandy LaRusso, he grimaces, rubbing his sleep-warm hand down his chin like he’s trying to scrape the ghosts out. He realizes as he steps onto the balcony, tugging his silk robe tight, that this is the first dream he can recall at all, since the divorce. Maybe that’s worth a trip to the psychiatrist’s chair.

He leans out into the wind, trying not to think about the halls of his high school where the nightmare always begins, where the walls, instead of being lined with cheerleader tryout flyers and announcements for student council elections tacked to corkboard, are damp with blood instead. In the dream he always begins by running, breath whistling in his throat with Dutch right behind him, and Dutch doesn’t even have to run to be two or three steps behind. Singsonging his name into the empty school, while the walls bleed.

_Danielle. Dani-elle. Danny, where ya going?_

He doesn’t want to think about this, has no interest or headspace or emotional real estate to dwell on a play by play. Daniel reaches for the bow he’s made at the front of his robe, tugging on it to loosen the rich silk which does nothing for the cold but has usually helped to comfort him. It’s not giving much. He recalls with a flare of guilt how happy Amanda was three or four Christmases ago, watching him open the box, parting the lilac tissue paper to reveal the gift inside. _I know it’s not a traditional yukata, Danny, but I couldn’t resist_ , she’d said, pressing her coffee-with-marshmallow-warm mouth to his cheek as he shook it from the wrapping, the fabric flowing over his knuckles and hers. _You deserve beautiful things, always._

In the nightmare, Dutch always catches him by the scruff. If it were really possible to dive Matrix-style into your own mind, rearrange the furniture, alter even one thing that could make your inner living more liveable, Danny would change that, that sick, stomach dropping to his knees feeling of being caught from behind by Dutch. It rattles him to the core in nauseous slow-motion dreamtime, being suspended in the air like a scrawny piñata about to be bludgeoned to death, spraying confetti guts everywhere. Too bad Daniel’s never had anything that colourful to offer, only red stuff. Blood. Pasta sauce staining his chest. Red on red, running over like a trick faucet. Dutch always wins in the dream, spins Danny around in his arms to smile with an I’ve won the lottery Cheshire grin, pushes him into the locker room at the 1984 All Valley, bleeding school corridor morphing into training ground but what part of all this isn’t a training ground, really. Daniel shuts his eyes, and West Valley morphs into a slithering of Cobra Kais looping around him, pulling at his gi strings, dipping fingers into the waistband of his pants to snap the elastic against his skin. Four boys with snakes’ dripping fangs where their square white Californian teeth should be, and at the center of them, venomous and beaming, Dutch. _Come on, come on. Make a move._

It's not like Daniel hasn’t tried to keep it from getting to this point. Lucid dreaming techniques. Tea of legal and less, uh, over-the-counter blends. Meditation on top of all the meditation he’s done for most of his damn life, seems like. If he could just get it to stop, to stutter out before Dutch and the others corner him in the locker room. It might at least make waking up feel less like being dragged from a snake pit, more venom than blood in his veins. In the nightmare, the four boys are poking him, fingertips turning into tiny teeth that draw red little rivers, dirtying his gi, pinpricks of red bleeding through the bonsai with its orange sun emblazoned on his back. No referee comes to the rescue, barking orders to save it for the ring. It always winds up here with four fine and strong serpents ripping him into tiny pieces, a silent king cobra standing guard. Keeping watchful. Doing nothing.

_Dead meat. One way or another, you’re dead meat._

“C’mon, stupid heart,” Daniel says aloud into the quiet and the cold, jerks his hands away from the railing to drag his body into the shower, tossing his glasses onto the crumpled bedsheets. Jets of water hot as he can manage stream over his skin, pyjamas a silk huddle right outside the door. He presses his face into his palms as the cleansing streams wash over him, pinpricking his bare back with endless tiny nips of sensation. He knows and doesn’t want to examine what waits further down the jagged warren of the nightmare. He remembers and dreads the dessert that follows this butchery of a main course, this place with all the blood hissed out of his body via pre-fight exsanguination. Does it even matter if snakes kill their prey like this? It’s how they kill him in horrorshow snoozeland. It’s how Dutch has killed him over and over again. Daniel presses one hand to the jade green tiles, feels his body keel into the familiarity of that death. He slides down til his knees hit the sluicing water and leans his soaking head gently against the wall. Dead meat, he thinks, doesn’t even make any sense as a pugilistic taunt. Isn’t the meat already dead by the time you’re carving it up, by the time you’re wrapping it in brown butcher’s paper and tying it with string? What parts of him would even be worth taking home to serve to anybody with a lick of good taste?

Skinny limbs. Big mouth. Oh, and don’t forget that stupid heart.

“Why didn’t you do anything, Johnny?” Daniel asks, the sound of his voice thin and uncertain over the roaring water pouring on his skull. _Was it because you wanted me dead?_

When the phone rings, it’s like really waking up, almost as if everything he’s done since startling upright was part of the nightmare, too. As if Dutch is standing outside his apartment, leaning against the stucco looking up at the moon. Snake eyes in place of human ones, slitted and emerald, and a tongue that forks out in anticipation. Waiting for Danny to make a move. Maybe that’ll be Daniel LaRusso’s Christmas present tomorrow. You step out your door and you’re dead meat, champ.

“I didn’t wake you, right?” Amanda’s voice is sambuca-warm con la mosca. In the background, Daniel can hear lilting strains of Anoush’s Christmas Eve tradition with the kids: Persian-American karaoke classics. It’s a pretty awesome ritual. Daniel pretends not to be jealous, and he mostly isn’t. Mostly what he misses are the easy-as-worn-shoesoles exchanges he and Anoush have always shared, until, well. A new family started shaping itself in the space where a not-so-awesome husband found himself uprooted, a faulty bonsai who couldn’t even contour himself properly into a damn good pot.

The metaphor is fucked but Daniel’s heart is still racing and he needs the coldest martini this side of hell, so he lets himself off the hook.

“Nah, Mandy. Ah, shit, I was supposed to call you back, I’m sorry. I fell asleep as soon as I got back in. Woke before you rang, it’s cool. Heavy sales on the floor today, you know how it is. All those last minute Christmas presents with V6 hearts and upgraded custom leather interiors,” he fumbles for his glasses again so he can get the time on the alarm clock, “ah, it’s later than I thought. Sorry, sorry. I’d ask are the kids asleep but I can hear them crooning with your husband.” 

“Nothing says ‘I’m sorry I’m such a shitbag’ or ‘Nuh uh, I so don’t throw money at my deep-seated problems especially at the holidays’ or ‘Oh god, graduate and move out already’ like a shiny Porsche with a Santa hat perched on the hood,” Amanda laughs, and this, if he’s honest, is part of what Daniel misses too. Christmas Eve, working the floor with Norouzi and Mandy as unflappable as anything, breaking out clandestine-slash-celebratory champagne between sales, working down to the wire and loving it. He had loved it, hadn’t he? He’d checked his bright showroom beam in the mirror at the North Hollywood dealership first thing this morning, turned his head this way and that, saluted himself with a tongue click and two pointed imaginary guns at his reflection. Still got it, never lost it, never going a damn place but up, baby. Yeah, twenty cars off the lot today. Got it in spades.

He doesn’t realize he’s gone quiet til Manda nudges him. “Danny?”

“Uh, sorry. Weird. You know. Dreams.”

“Oh, Danny.” She doesn’t say what they both know she, bless her charitable heart, is thinking. That she wishes he weren’t alone, inasmuch as he’s only fifteen minutes away this time of night, no traffic to speak of, and she could get into her car if he needed it, she really could. He’d rather go another round in the nightmare ring than ask her. His tab with Amanda Norouzi’s already unpayable. One more time for old time’s sake is already impossible--Anoush would have rabbits--and Danny’s damned grateful for that. It means he can’t dip his hands backwards into a well he poisoned.

_Dramatic, Danielle._

“It’s okay, Mandy. Really. You guys might see me a little early in the morning, that’s all. You sure you don’t need me to bring anything?” He stares blankly at the clock, watches a red digital minute creep by. Sleep or any illusion of it is gone, shrivelled up.

“No-o, just don’t forget your bag of Santa Dad presents, and we’re – yes, I’m asking again,” she drops her voice to a whisper, sambuca-theatrical since the rest of her family can’t hear her over the enthusiastically lilting Farsi filling the background, Anoush’s voice high with amused love, Sam’s laughter like a tinkling chorus of silver bells, “—are we sure she’s ready for the Audi?” 

“Definitely,” he replies, and he doesn’t even have to think about it. “I know she’s been running with different girls this year, but I trust her, you trust her. She’s such a good, strong kid, it’s gonna take more than that set to turn her head. She’s not your daughter for nothing. Damn, can you imagine her face tomorrow? I’ll drive it up myself, tell Anoush not to worry about picking it up from the Tarzana lot. Yeah, yeah I’m sure. I’ll be there before the wrapping paper’s off the first present.”

“Mm, he’ll thank you for saving him the trip. I think these three are deep into the mint oreos and Persian classics; they’ll be up a while. Ohh, before I forget, Anoush said he met an interesting old friend of yours at the NoHo lot a few days ago. Says he’ll fill you in over breakfast. Get some rest, Danny, okay? That valerian’s still where I left it last time I visited, I have spies.”

“Little gumshoes, the fruit of our loins,” he laughs into the phone and is rewarded by the sound of his ex-wife and still business partner, laughing back. It’s a pleasant thing to punctuate his night, an unexpected gift. That’s not an unfair way to describe their fifteen years of marriage either: a gift, unsought, unlooked for, choosing the seat next to his in undergraduate economics and the rest was a kind of perfect history. West Coast Rockwellian. Pretty Tuscan villa with a pool. Two outrageously good children, never mind glued-to-videogames, never mind defiant streak a mile wide, that was Mickey Mouse stuff compared to true ace degeneracy. It had been goddamned great til it wasn’t, and even now that those golden days were done, it was still mostly great thanks to Mandy. Compassionate glue, he’d called her over sushi after signing the papers. Though she’d crinkled her nose and put extra wasabi on her plate in response, he knew the wonky compliment had reached her. They’d taken the rest of the day off and she’d made him promise, his pants rolled up, her high heels slung into the crooks of her fingertips, that Divorce Beach Day would continue to be a thing. Sure, Daniel said, sure, but not Topanga, I dunno, that place didn’t have the best childhood stuff attached.

What he didn’t say and doesn’t say to her, God or anyone: some places are haunted enough.

When he falls back asleep he goes directly to the tournament floor of the All Valley except it’s laid out for a banquet. Johnny Lawrence is at the head of the table, a golden crown on his golden head. He’s flanked by trophies tall as he is, big, elegant beasts of burnished metal with miniature figurines of Danny perched atop, howling in pain. Like Han Solo except no actual escape from the carbonite is gonna be forthcoming. The Empire Strikes Back. Cobra Kai Strikes First. Daniel LaRusso gets suckered in the end, and that’s the true ending. That’s what you don’t see when the mats are rolled up and stacked, when the flashy posters get torn down and thrown in the garbage.

Dutch sits at the right hand of Johnny, passes him something red and wet on a hammered copper plate. “Go on, Champ,” Dutch grins, tying a lotus flower hachimaki around Johnny’s neck like a rib bib, “eat up. You earned it.” The tournament hall is filled with the soothing sibilance of thousands of happy snakes. You can’t see them, but you know they’re there. That’s the thing about a cobra, Daniel reflects as he watches Johnny pick up an oversize golden knife, carve into the chunk of still-beating heart. So much fresh red leaks out when the knife hits home. It runs down the dining table til it touches them all like a tributary reaching out to favoured sons: Bobby, Tommy, Jimmy, everyone. At the other end of the table is Kreese, silent and faceless, his back turned in the dream, his arms wide in a posture of wordless approval. He has a white gi patterned with an orange sun and a bleeding bonsai spread on his lap like a napkin. He reaches for a golden goblet and spills red all down his uniform since he is dressed for war, somehow now everyone seated is dressed for war, maybe they were at the beginning because isn’t there always one? Isn’t there always one going on? Daniel watches as barely eighteen year old Johnny lowers his blond head like a lion and gets to work on the uncooked flesh weeping on his plate.

_C’mon, stupid heart. Get up and fight, old thing. Get up and don’t be dead._

Except it turns out you can’t fight when you’re literally drawn and quartered. With no saviours—no wise and irreverent senseis in suits, no ex-girlfriends bounding over with last minute scoring tips and stolen black belts—Danny watches on as Johnny Lawrence eats his heart, licking his mouth like he’s cleaning up ruby lipstick from a one night stand, the sound of Danny’s heart velvety and chewy as it’s crushed under incisors built for nothing but sweet war.

Why isn’t he afraid, watching himself die and be devoured?

What’s it got to do with the one who’s doing the eating? _Think, stupid heart. Oh. You can’t. Not where you’re going._ If it’s not fear he’s feeling, then who’s crying now?

He’s whole again, back in the school hallway, and Dutch is whispering _Danielle, let’s try that one more time._ His body stiffens like a leadshot animal too stupid to die right, and he spoke too soon about that fear. It’s back, though it left when he was in Johnny Lawrence’s mouth. It’s back in a body that doesn’t even know how to be frightened right, but he’s got no time to think about that because Dutch is chasing him, chasing him again and before he even gets going he realizes his sneakers are full of banquet blood.

_This time, you dumb fucking heart, you useless thing, try to remember. Try--_

When he wakes up, sunlight streaming Christmas into his bedroom, the sheets are soaked and it’s a quarter past the time he promised to pick up Samantha’s car. Daniel darts out of bed, finishes dressing in the covered garage, swearing and fielding “Where are you? Everything okay? We can wait for you to start breakfast,” texts from Mandy, and pulls out of the Legado suites feeling like his skin is shedding. Like when he arrives at the Norouzis’ Beverly Hills detached modern he still isn’t sure he’s seen every room of because it multiplies, it must add new rooms to itself overnight, like when he gets there and steps out of the car he’s gonna find that he’s changed bodies entirely. You’ve got to adapt to make it through, after all. You’ve got to punch at the face in the mirror sometimes til it shows you a reflection you can begin to stand. Fight or flight, right? Daniel exhales at the next red light, squishes his palms over his eyes for an indulgent and non-roadworthy couple seconds. He needs coffee. He needs to get with the program. He needs—

“Hey, Bonzai Guy! Merry Fuckin’ Christmas!”

Daniel blinks, grins reflexively at the tipsy all-night celebrants spilling out of the sunroof of the A3, which, he’s gotta laugh. This is the exact car he and Mandy are giving Sam and its overflowing with three party-hard socialites doing their best crane kicks in high heels, messy alcohol-anointed curls streaming into the breeze, a long-suffering chauffeur staring straight ahead like they can Jedi-will the lights to change colour now. He shakes his head and wishes them Happy Holidays right back, sees them collapse against each other in fits of giggles and calls for more prosecco as they clear the intersection, their sequinny shimmery dresses catching the light and making the morning, for a brief second, as outrageous and unapologetic as a disco ball. As he turns off Ventura, he feels so glad for the reminder he could bawl. That though the small tournament space in the endless showroom display of your life feels fucked to high heaven, it doesn’t mean everyone else’s is, too.

Really, isn’t that what Christmas is all about?

“Dad, you have some—glitter? In your hair? And this is my… what, no. This is mine? Dad!” Sam throws her arms around him and emits a squeak, still in her pjs with hot chocolate on her warm breath. Anthony stands on the doorstep in fuzzy Darth Vader slippers, making predictions about what kind of ride he’s gonna get from Santa when he turns 16. Amanda and Anoush tumble out onto the front lawn too, like Daniel is somehow the long awaited present, the missing spice in the KFC, the thing that’s gonna get this Christmas morning shindig going. As Sam hugs him tight, he shuts his eyes for a minute and holds her right back. He lets himself believe in the fairytale that it might be.

It's not til the next day that Anoush remembers to pick up on the stray thread of conversation Amanda dropped in passing. They wouldn’t normally open Boxing Day, but it’s been a hell of a year for business and some VIP clients have convinced themselves (with the help of Anoush’s slickly crafted seasonal newsletters) that a little extra torque is what the new year calls for. Danny isn’t moved by these people and feels vaguely wretched for the selfishness of his thoughts: people are his business, much like a multi-chain-carrying ghost who drags suitcases of regrets around on a slow haunting to nowhere. Mankind and the cars of mankind. Somehow, he doesn’t think his version would cut mustard in an Encino Christmas Carol. Besides, Christmas is gone. He washed the party girls’ stray glitter out of his hair last night and had to laugh again because the first trip Sam took in her A3 was to pick up her grandmother from Burbank, so pretty much the opposite of a wild ride—though with Lucille LaRusso, who can say for certain?

“That friend of yours is wild, man,” Anoush comments, forking pesto alla trapanese into his mouth, sent to him by Lucille because clearly his mother and ex-wife are meant to be linked via culinary wars no matter what embossed divorce papers declare or don’t. He thinks both women secretly like the barbed interactions, the passive-aggressive recipe sharing, and that comforts him, too. How he doesn’t need to be central to their beef for said beef to continue. He bets they'll still call on Sam to settle their disputations. Before you can blink and say kanpai, she'll be swirling conciliatory glasses of top-shelf cab with them both. Sixteen to twenty-one shouldn't leap forward widestepped and eager as a crane, but that's time for you. It's a blessing and a bitch, sharing the same tatami.

“Huh?” Danny replies, paying attention to the bonsai he’d promised to nurse back to better health, contritely pressed into his arms by their oil tycoon client, returning to upgrade her wife’s sports coupe with the half-dead tiny tree in tow. Some things, he chides himself as he streams water gently into the soil, aren’t meant for some people. He would say he doesn’t know why he persists, but that would be a lie. Not everyone knows they can grow something good til they stick their hands in the dirt. He’s got to try.

“Your friend? Mandy might have mentioned it yesterday? Yeah, insane but hilarious. That one word name. Butch? Dash? Chuck? He drove the best SUV off the lot, didn’t ask about the price. Drew a weird little snake under his signature on the paperwork, which, I should ask accounts if that’s strictly legal… Daniel. Daniel? Whoa—”

Danny looks down at the shears in his hand, the severed bonsai branch on the desk. He blinks, trying to tilt the world as he understood it up to one second ago back into frame. There’s a roaring in his ears like a tidal course of blood, pouring from high school lockers, squelching in shoes that have run just about as far as they can. “Did he. A message. Did he leave one?” he hears himself ask over the obscene office quiet.

Anoush’s brow staples in concern but he smiles as he responds, like there’s some hidden puzzle between old pals in the message he’s carrying, a nostalgic slice of off-colour ribbing that best buddies laugh at down the line. Something sweet and stupid for the sake of all those old, fast times.

“Yeah. He said he’d see you soon. It was the weirdest thing? He said to tell you, “See you soon, Danielle.” I’m pretty sure—he was driving away with the radio cranked to eleven on eighties rock—but yeah, it was Danielle.”

 _Oh, God_ , his stupid heart seizes, punching him. _Well, well, well._

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter 2 releases February 28th. Be kind to yourselves and water your bonsais. xx


End file.
